● 09.15.16

● Links 15/9/2016: CUPS 2.2, Copyright Undermines European Internet Users

Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There is nothing I can’t do on my Linux-powered computers. And no other platform works so much better that I feel the need to move to it.

• This is a fantastic opportunity for technically capable students who want a chance to learn the tricks of an exploding new tech trade from the best teachers, he told LinuxInsider.

• The growing popularity of programs focusing on open source technology is significant, observed Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux.

Server

• The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst) is looking for a supplier of the Linux operating system for its IBM System z mainframes.

• The public tender comprises provision of the operating system for four IFL processors for a period of one year, and maintenance of and support for the platform for eight years. The latter term can twice be extended by a further year.

• The contract will be awarded to the supplier offering the lowest price. Bids must be received by 24 October, and the contract will start on 1 December.

• Now that so many enterprises have moved from the evaluation stage to deployment of OpenStack, they are in need of ways to organize and protect the applications they run in the cloud. That calls for storage, application management and security solutions–a space where Veritas has traditionally been prominent.

• Now, Red Hat, which has been accelerating its OpenStack efforts, has announced a collaboration with Veritas aimed at supporting business critical enterprise applications on OpenStack. The two companies have already teamed on business continuity, storage management and data protection solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization. Now they plan to work together “to offer predictable quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads, regardless of scale.”

Kernel Space

• I grew up with the Windows platform and I saw that we had to pay a license fee to be able to use it, which is something I didn’t want. Then I saw that Linux is the open source system that can be used for free, and we can pretty much do anything we want and more than can be done with Windows.

• I’ve used many open source tools and technologies and I loved the way they work. I am a true fan of Linux and open source.

Graphics Stack

• When Apache began the public discussion of what to do with OpenOffice, I knew someone would bring up the LibreOffice remerger. Today Jack Wallen did just that. Elsewhere, Neil Rickert said that Solus still needs more work to be a daily driver and more on NVIDIA with Wayland was discussed in the Land of Wobbly Windows. Sebastian Kuegler blogged Plasma 5.8 excludes Wayland from long term support and Bruce Byfield highlighted seven KDE applications sometimes forgotten and Dedoimedo pimped Xfce.

• The announcement of KDE Neon dev/unstable switching to Wayland by default raised quite a few worried comments as NVIDIA’s proprietary driver is not supported. One thing should be clear: we won’t break any setups. We will make sure that X11 is selected by default if the given hardware setup does not support Wayland. Nevertheless I think that the amount of questions show that I should discuss this in more detail.

Applications

• Apple announced the release of a new stable version of its open-source CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) software used in the macOS operating system and all GNU/Linux distributions.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I’ve been recently porting my Direct3D engine to OpenGL so it could run on platforms other than Windows, but it didn’t work as intended. After a lot of debugging (using ApiTrace) I’d decided to try to run it on Ubuntu and guess what? It worked exactly like I wanted it to. Earlier this afternoon I tried to use llvmpipe (a software rasterizer) on Windows and it ran just like it did on Ubuntu.

• When it comes to the digital distribtion of video games, there are many animals in the ecosystem but only one real eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That, of course, is Steam, Valve’s platform for a digital games marketplace. The fact that some insane percentage of online game purchases go through Steam is great news for Valve, of course, but it comes with challenges as well. There’s a balancing act Steam must do, as it must ingratiate itself to both buyers of games and those who develop the games.

• One recent attempt to, according to Valve, make Steam game reviews more useful to the gaming community has developers concerned, however. And, even if we take Steam’s claims to its reasoning for the change, the concern by game developers is entirely understandable and warranted. This whole thing has to do with how Steam is prioritizing game reviews that come from reviewers who bought the game directly from Steam, as opposed to applying download keys acquired elsewhere.

• The Linux version has only seen minimal testing, so be sure to report any bugs you find.

• This is only the second game from 10tons Ltd to see a Linux version, but hopefully it means their future games will be too.

• Here’s the news you have been desperate to hear, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [Official Site] is officially heading to SteamOS & Linux and it’s being ported by Feral Interactive.

• Creepy Castle [Steam Link] from Dopterra and publisher Nicalis, Inc. is an exploratory, sidescrolling RPG about an awesome moth. It’s confirmed for Linux and will release on October 31st.

• Back in June they announced on their forum the experimental Linux builds, from the few reports in that post (and the report emailed to me) it seems to run reasonably well.

• EVERSPACE [Official Site] is the brand new graphically impressive space shooter from ROCKFISH Games. They’ve had a few troubles with the Linux build, but they have said it should be on Linux before the end of September.

• The game is using Unreal Engine and it seems it hasn’t been the best experience for them.

• I am unbelievable excited to try this out, as graphically looks amazing, but even more importantly the actual gameplay looks intense and fun too!

• Event[0] [Official Site] is a very cool looking sci-fi exploration game, and the great news is that the developers told me they are doing a Linux build too.

• Feral Interactive are at it again folks, it’s been a while since we had a teaser. Looks like tomorrow we will get a new game announcement from Feral.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Our upcoming release, Plasma 5.8 will be the first long-term supported (LTS) release of the Plasma 5 series. One great thing of this release is that it aligns support time-frames across the whole stack from the desktop through Qt and underlying operating systems. This makes Plasma 5.8 very attractive for users need to that rely on the stability of their computers.

• Thursday, 15 September 2016. Today KDE releases a beta of its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma. This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed.

• The 17th edition of the International Free Software Forum (FISL) took place, as usual, at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul’s Convention Center, city of Porto Alegre, from 13th to 16th July. FISL is the largest FOSS conference in Latin America and a quite traditional venue to get a comprehensive panorama of all sorts of FOSS-related new topics: technical advances, adoption cases, FOSS and education, hacker culture, just to mention a few.

• This year, FISL started an effort which aims at strengthening the respect for diversity in FOSS communities. Many activities were led by and/or had the participation of minority groups, emphasizing the need for respect and diversity regarding gender identity, special needs, sexual orientation, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, religion and socioeconomic status.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Maps developer Marcus Lundblad talks in his latest blog post about some of the major new features coming to the GNOME Maps application as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.

• Delayed one day, the Release Candidate (RC) build of the forthcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment is now available for early adopters and public testers before its final launch next week.

Distributions

Reviews

• Solus is an interesting distro. But it is probably not aimed at me as a potential user (the absence of “rsync”, “vi” and “diff” all suggest this limitation). While there is improvement since my previous review, I think it still not ready for prime time. It needs a management tool, ipv6 support and better crypto support.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The first snapshots for the month of September have been released for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system, and Douglas DeMaio is here again to report on the freshly added software versions.

• Snapshots this week added new sensations for Tumbleweed users, but there were plenty of other updates in the repositories to get people excited.

• While snapshot 20160907 added some subpackages to enhance PulseAudio and updated telepathy-qt5 to version 0.9.7, GStreamer fixed quite a few bugs in its update to version 1.8.3 to improve media processing. Wine’s 32-bit subpackage update in the snapshot, bringing it to version 1.9.18, added support for multiple kernel drivers in a single process.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is working with information management firm Veritas on data backup and storage in OpenStack clouds.

• The duo will work together to delver what they call “predictable” quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads “regardless of scale”.

• Veritas will work on integration of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform for data protection.

• Red Hat’s general manager for OpenStack Radhesh Balakrishnan said in a statement he is “delighted” to collaborate with the storage firm.

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced QuickStart Cloud Installer as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite, its pre-integrated set of cloud technologies. With the web-based, graphical QuickStart Cloud Installer, users can orchestrate the installation of Red Hat Cloud Suite components from a single interface. As a result, users can access a fully functional private cloud environment with pre-defined default configurations within mere hours as shown by Red Hat testing.

• Red Hat introduced Wednesday QuickStart Cloud Installer as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite, its pre-integrated set of cloud technologies. With the web-based, graphical QuickStart Cloud Installer, users can orchestrate the installation of Red Hat Cloud Suite components from a single interface. As a result, users can access a fully functional private cloud environment with pre-defined default configurations within mere hours as shown by Red Hat testing.

• Herzog Technologies has launched a cloud-based positive train control (PTC) solution using the technologies of Red Hat, Inc., a leading global provider of open source solutions.

• Herzog says the company launched the PTC because they recognized a need for a cost-effective, open source and cloud-based PTC option. The company chose to build its new PTC solution on a private cloud that is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is managed by Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite.

Finance

Fedora

• Hello Planet Fedora! I hope you are holding on to your hats, because Bodhi 2.2.0 is on its way to a Rawhide near you. But wait, that’s not all – we will be updating Bodhi in EPEL 7 to the new 2.2.0 release as well.

• The web server changes include a fix for CVE-2016-1000008 (thanks to Patrick Uiterwijk for reporting), some new features, and some bug fixes. The client changes will be more drastic when 2.2.0 reaches Rawhide, as the client in Rawhide has been behind for a while on a 0.9 release. Once 2.2.0 is released upstream, the 2.2 client will make its way into Rawhide. The client is a rewrite from the 0.9 series, and is not backwards compatible. There is a man page to guide you.

• Furthering the FOSS Wave initiative to prepare students for the industry, it required us to work closely with and mentor people in the right way. Bhopal, India, has a good number of contributors who want to learn about Fedora Quality Assurance (QA). I started off by helping them to start with a few QA activities.

• I am happy to release the F24-20160914 updated lives isos with the kernel-4.7.3-201.

• Ansible is a great tool for system administrators who want to automate system administration tasks. From configuration management to provisioning and managing containers for application deployments, Ansible makes it easy. The lightweight module based architecture is ideal for system administration. One advantage is that when the node is not being managed by Ansible, no resources are used.

• This article covers how to use Ansible to provision Vagrant boxes. A Vagrant box in simple terms is a virtual machine prepackaged with tools required to run the development environment. You can use these boxes to distribute the development environment used by other team members for project work. Using Ansible, you can automate provisioning the Vagrant boxes with your development packages.

• As always: Provide feedback to improve packaging and the language itself. I’m also curious to see the first native Rust app in Fedora. Maybe rusty coreutils?

• I have planned to do this for more than two months, but we didn’t have any computer science club in my college. If it was for one event, we could have done it separate, but I wanted to organize multiple workshops (open source, mobile app development, website development, competitions, robotics etc). Thus, we needed a proper platform to easily organize the events without bothering too many people.

• I put the idea to open a club and inaugurate it. Later, we came to know that there was already an existing club named Labyrinth. This club was inactive for more than 18 months. No one was aware of it excluding four to five teachers. The teacher whom we approached to help us in initiating a new club also was not aware of it. After talking to the management, they told us the same thing. Starting a whole new club would take too much time, so we reopened Labyrinth and we had our first workshop in it.

• Another event, another great experience! This is my short (hopefully) event report from BalCCon2k16 which was held in my hometown – Novi Sad.

• Flatpak developer Alex Larsson announced the release of Flatpak 0.6.10, a new maintenance update of the universal Linux binary format used in various GNU/Linux distributions.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Softpedia was informed by the Q4OS Team about the availability of download of the second maintenance update to the Q4OS 1.6 “Orion” series of the Debian-based operating system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Logic Supply informs Softpedia today that it launched a new line of modular panel PCs during the International Manufacturing Technology Show 2016 (IMTS) event that is taking place this week until Saturday, September 18, in Chicago, U.S.A.

Flavours and Variants

• The reason? I am not so fond of an LXDE desktop environment that isn’t an integrated desktop environment per se, but rather a collection of different small tools under the same roof.

• But anyway I thought there should be a review for this distribution, especially because it is in the Top-20 of Distrowatch rating.

• As happened multiple times before, the trigger was a request from my customers. One of them ordered a disk with Lubuntu 16.04 operating system. You can order your personal copy of Lubuntu operating system too!

Devices/Embedded

• I’ve read that a fun and easy thing to do with a Raspberry Pi is to set it up as a dedicated blog server. I’ve never really had my own blog, so I decided I would give this project a shot. I hope that this article serves as a guide for those of you who would like to start a blog or who have a Raspberry Pi that’s not doing anything and are looking for a worthy project.

• Pine64’s $2 “PADI IoT Stamp” module is based on Realtek’s new “RTL8710AF” Cortex-M3 WiFi SoC, a cheaper FreeRTOS-ready competitor to the ESP8266.

• Realtek’s RTL8710AF WiFi system-on-chip began showing up on tiny “B&T” labeled modules in July in China on AliExpress, as described in this Hackaday post. The Realtek SoC offers an even lower cost, and almost identical alternative to Espressif’s similarly Cortex-M3 based ESP8266 WiFi SoC. The Cortex-M3 based RTL8710AF costs a bit over $3 individually, but can be had for as little as $1.99 in volume.

• It’s hard to go a day without seeing interesting and compelling Indiegogo or Kickstarter projects that feature the Raspberry Pi, Pine 64 or the Intel Edison inside some sort of embedded device or standalone computer or laptop. Last fall, I stumbled across one such project that billed itself as “the first $99 Raspberry Pi desktop”, and I felt the need to have it.

• In fact, I forwarded a link to the Indiegogo pi-topCEED campaign to my wife and suggested, “This would make a great Christmas present!” Unlike other RPi projects and kits, the pi-topCEED billed itself as a fully integrated, plug-and-play learning platform, complete with an RPi2 (later upgraded to an RPi3), a 13.3″ HD LCD screen (later upgraded to 14″), and a breadboard kit for attaching and experimenting with external devices.

Phones

Tizen

• The relationship between Tizen and Unity is building up very well over time. Off recently, Samsung even announced a Tizen App Challenge for Unity developers to bring more high quality Unity games on to the platform. Meanwhile, Unity have now patched their Game engine with version 5.4.0 P4 . The patch brings a lot of bug fixes and improvements across various platforms like Windows, OSX, Android, iOS and Tizen.

• Samsung’s Gear 360 camera works with just a few high-end Samsung smartphones like the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, the same way the Gear VR headset only supports select Samsung smartphones. Seems Samsung placed some sort of restriction of all other smartphone brands, allowing the app to support only some mostly high-end Samsung smartphones. The Korean giant also disabled 4K video filming in the Gear 360 on all devices except the Galaxy S7. But all these are now past, as a new modified version of the Samsung Gear 360 Manager has emerged which opens up the Gear 360 to work with other smartphones.

Android

• Samsung shipped around 2.5 million potentially explosive Galaxy Note 7s out into the world, and now it needs customers to bring them back. Getting the masses to relinquish their smartphones, even when they can be a danger to them or the things around them, has proven to be a challenge. To encourage stubborn owners to turn in their devices, Samsung will push out an Over The Air (OTA) update to recalled Note 7s that will limit the battery to 60-percent capacity. The hope is that customers will be annoyed into action.

• A SAMSUNG Galaxy S7 owner fears she could have been killed as it overheated in her hand and exploded.

• Supply teacher Sarah Crockett, 30, told how the phone blew up in a busy cafe even though it was not being charged.

• Android apps have arrived on Chrome OS. Right now they can be run on three Chromebook models, a number that will increase during the rest of 2016 and into the start of 2017 (Google has a full list). To save you the wait, we got hold of an Asus Chromebook Flip to show you how the Android experience works on a Chromebook.

• Ever wanted to use Android on your spare desktop or laptop, maybe even tablet, but didn’t really care for all the bells and whistles offered by Jide’s Remix OS for PC? If that’s the case, then this latest Android-x86 release might just be the right fit for you. Now at version 6.0-r1, this is the first stable release of Android-x86 based on Android Marshmallow. And while it may not have yet the multi-tasking features of 7.0 Nougat, it does pave the way for that brighter future for Android on PCs.

• The latest version of Android packs the usual raft of new features, but none are as flashy as its revamped multitasking abilities, especially the new side-by-side view that lets you use two apps at once.

• Nougat also adds a couple of other essential new multitasking features: the ability to quickly switch between the current app and the last one you were using, as well as a one-tap method for closing all your multitasking windows at once. Let’s give the trio a try.

• Apps built by Mono, the software development toolkit, were crashing indiscriminatingly on Samsung’s latest Android handsets with illegal instruction errors despite the code being good. The Gamecube-Wii emulator Dolphin, and the PSP emulator PPSSPP, were also falling over on the phones.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source can break down barriers to startups and innovation in the comms industry, which can often be resistant to new ideas.

• “Our industry as a whole has a high barrier to entry for startups, and new small companies,” Tom Anschutz, distinguished member of the AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) technical staff, said, speaking on a panel about the future of the data center. “With open source, SDN and NFV, one of the roles and responsibilities of innovating and bringing new things to the industry has opened up.”

• However, while open source provides great value, somebody’s got to provide packaged support, Trey Hall, vice president of marketing and technology for Walker and Associates, said. Barriers to entry are low, but support is still challenging.

• A lot of computer software is proprietary – you have to buy it, and modifying the code is strictly off-limits. But another type of software – called “open-source software” – performs as its name implies. Anyone is free to inspect, modify or enhance it.

• Over the years, this method of coding has led to some useful innovations, primarily for a variety of everyday computing tasks that pretty much anyone using the Internet today unknowingly takes advantage of. Now, open-source software is bleeding into the agriculture industry.

• As economic policy becomes more complex, it grows less transparent.

• To bring some insight into the data and forecasts, the American Enterprise Institute’s Open Source Policy Center (OSPC) has developed a new approach to policy analysis.

• The TaxBrain web application lets users simulate and study the effect of tax policy reforms using open source economic models. Developed and launched in April by OSPC, TaxBrain aims “to make economic policy analysis more transparent, accessible and scientific,” AEI officials said.

• Google is a titan in the technology industry. Google has contributed to nearly every front of technology, and, since the Alphabet restructuring, has become the single most valuable company in the world. Google has also made some notable contributions to the open source community in the form of Android, Chromium OS, Go, Material Design Icons etc.

• PowerPoint is one of those programs whose use has become so ingrained in the corporate world that it is probably running the risk of becoming completely genericized, in the same way that some people use Kleenex to refer to all tissues, or BAND-AIDs to refer to all bandages.

• But presenting a slideshow doesn’t have to mean using PowerPoint. There are a number of totally capable open source alternatives to PowerPoint for giving visual presentations. In many cases, the features of these “alternatives” are so compelling that, unless you’re absolutely forced to use PowerPoint, I don’t know why you still would.

SaaS/Back End

• Based in Prague, TCP Cloud provides managed services around deployments of OpenStack, OpenContrail and Kubernetes technologies. Mirantis CEO Alex Freedland says the addition of technology developed by TCP Cloud will reduce the amount of time it would have taken Mirantis to move OpenStack to Kubernetes by six to nine months. As a result, he says, Mirantis expects to show the first fruits of a joint development effort involving CoreOS, Google and Intel in the first quarter of 2017.

• Docker containers are ephemeral by design. They come and they go like a herd of hyperactive squirrels, which is great for high availability, but not so great for preserving your data. Kendrick Coleman of EMC {code} demonstrated how to have both ephemeral containers and persistent data in his talk called “Highly Available & Distributed Containers” at ContainerCon North America.

• As container technologies become more complex, using them becomes easier. Coleman gave a wonderful presentation using a Minecraft game to demonstrate persistent data storage with ephemeral containers, and did it all live. This setup requires two technologies that were not available as recently as a year ago: Docker SwarmKit and REX-Ray.

• This is a short collection of tips and tricks showing how Docker can be useful when working with Go code. For instance, I’ll show you how to compile Go code with different versions of the Go toolchain, how to cross-compile to a different platform (and test the result!), or how to produce really small container images.

• The following article assumes that you have Docker installed on your system. It doesn’t have to be a recent version (we’re not going to use any fancy feature here).

• When Docker unveiled a formalized channel program today, partners gained a new springboard that could launch them deeper into DevOps, application lifecycle management and various managed services.

• The partner program launch was nearly three years in the making. To understand the journey, rewind to January 2014. That’s when the software container company hired former Red Hat Channel Chief Roger Egan as senior VP of sales.

• At the time, Egan told me Docker’s influence across the IT market could eventually eclipse Linux’s impact. Sure, Linux freed the world from expensive Unix servers and enabled data center consolidation projects. But containers, he reasoned, could speed application deployments across all types of on-premises and cloud systems.

• Across the history of data analytics, marquee-level applications have always given rise to useful front ends and connectors that extend what the original applications were capable of. For example, the dominance of the spreadsheet gave rise to macros, plugins, and extensions. Likewise, the rise of SQL database applications ushered in database front ends, plugins, and connectors. Now, Big Data titan Hadoop is inspiring its own ecosystem of powerful extensions and front ends.

• To explain what a difference these extenders and connectors can make, here are some examples of how Hadoop can be taken in new directions with these tools.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Let’s talk about OpenOffice. More than likely you’ve already read, countless times, that Apache OpenOffice is near the end. The last stable iteration was 4.1.2 (released October, 2015) and a recent major security flaw took a month to patch. A lack of coders has brought development to a creeping crawl. And then, the worst possible news hit the ether; the project suggested users switch to MS Office (or LibreOffice).

• For whom the bells tolls? The bell tolls for thee, OpenOffice.

• I’m going to say something that might ruffle a few feathers. Are you ready for it?

• The end of OpenOffice will be a good thing for open source and for users.

• The IDE allows development in Java and in other languages and runs operating systems that can fire up a JVM. As the Foundation explains in its proposal, “NetBeans has approximately 1.5 million active users around the world, in extremely diverse structures and organizations.” Students, teachers, “large organizations who base their software on the application framework beneath NetBeans” and many others use the tool.

• But the Foundation points out that “NetBeans has been run by Oracle, with the majority of code contributions coming from Oracle.”

• Moving the project to the Foundation is therefore seen as a way “to expand the diversity of contributors and to increase the level of meritocracy in NetBeans.”

• The Foundation seems to be betting that things can’t get worse with the potential for more contributors that would come with its stewardship. The proposal therefore says that “… though Oracle will relinquish its control over NetBeans, individual contributors from Oracle are expected to continue contributing to NetBeans after it has been contributed to Apache, together with individual contributors from other organizations, as well as self-employed individual contributors.”

Healthcare

• Since March, 30 2000 Linux Medical News has been on the Zope-based Squishdot blog before there was blogs software. After 16 years and 1963 articles (has it been that long?) we’ve finally moved to WordPress. As always, for 16 years, your announcements your news your opinions are welcome at http://linuxmednews.com

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Here, “Open Companies” refers primarily to the dozen or so startups in the now-defunct Open Company Initiative (OCI). Members included Buffer and FarmBot, as well as the mission-driven payments company I founded, Gratipay (née Gittip).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are delighted to announce GNU Guile release 2.1.4, the next pre-release in what will become the 2.2 stable series.

• This release fixes many small bugs, adds an atomic reference facility, and improves the effectiveness of integer unboxing in the compiler. See the release announcement for full details and a download link.

Public Services/Government

• Software developed with public funds should be made available as free and open source software, says Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda. Sharing source code should become a standard in IT procurement across the EU, the MEP says.

Licensing/Legal

• Open licensing works when you strike a healthy balance between obligations and reuse. Data, and how it is used, is different from software in ways that change that balance, making reasonable compromises in software (like attribution) suddenly become insanely difficult barriers.

• This FUD about open source software is mainly about open source licensing. There are many different licenses, some more restrictive (some people use the term “protective”) than others. Restrictive licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) use the concept of copyleft, which grants people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a piece of software as long as the same rights are preserved in derivative works. The GPL (v3) is used by open source projects such as bash and GIMP. There’s also the Affero GPL, which provides copyleft to software that is offered over a network (for example as a web service.)

• What this means is that if you take code that is licensed in this way and you modify it by adding some of your own proprietary code, then in some circumstances the whole new body of code, including your code, becomes subject to the restrictive open source license. It was this type of license that Ballmer was probably referring to when he made his statement.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Less than one in ten Dutch public agencies has registered any open data on the national open data portal. For municipalities, this falls to only one in twenty. These are the main results of an assessment performed by the Open State Foundation.

• According to the foundation, from 1,069 government organisations only 89 have datasets that can be found via the central government’s open data portal: Although all ministries and provinces have registered one or more datasets, datasets from only 21 of a total of 395 municipalities, seven of 246 regional cooperation bodies, 12 of 155 Self-Governing Bodies and four of the 23 water boards can be found. High Councils of State and Public Bodies have not registered any open datasets yet.

Standards/Consortia

• It’s hard to believe I’ve been working at The Linux Foundation on Hyperledger for four months already. I’ve been blown away by the amount of interest and support the project has received since the beginning of the year. As things really start to take off, I think it’s important to take a step back to reflect and recapitulate why and what we’re doing with Hyperledger. Simply put, we see Hyperledger as an “umbrella” for software developer communities building open source blockchain and related technologies. In this blog post, I’m going to try to define what we mean by “umbrella,” that is, the rationale behind it and how we expect that model to work towards building a neutral, foundational community.

• The framework of course depends on if your deployment is going to be internal, such as in a factory, or external, such as a consumer product. In this conversation, we’ll focus on products that are launching externally to a wider audience of customers, and for that, we have a lot to consider.

• There’s a general consensus among people working on telco virtualization that open source groups are replacing traditional standards groups.

• “In open source, code is the coin of the realm; express yourself with something that is useful,” said Tom Anschutz, distinguished member of AT&T’s technical staff, speaking yesterday at Light Reading’s 2016 NFV & Carrier SDN event.

Leftovers

• A global Gmail outage that began at 1.16am AEST this morning has affected millions of users across the world.

• Nine hours later, at 10.45am AEST, the company was still claiming that the service had been restored for “some users” as it did four times earlier after the initial announcement of the breakdown of the service.

• The first message at 1.16am said there were indications that the issue only affected Google for Work Gmail users.

• Subsequent messages did not clarify whether this was correct or not.

• About 40 minutes later, Google said it had identified the root cause of the issue and was implementing a “potential fix”.

Science

• We tend to think of memories as perfect little time capsules—important records of past events that matter to us and made us who we are, as unchangeable as a dragonfly stuck in amber. Well, they’re anything but. I recently met with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who specializes in the science of memory. “I am a memory hacker,” Shaw told me. “I use the science of memory to make you think you did things that never happened.”

Health/Nutrition

• The fight against legalized pot is being heavily bankrolled by alcohol and pharmaceutical companies, terrified that they might lose market share.

• On the heels of a filing last week that revealed that a synthetic cannabis company is financing the opposition to legal marijuana in Arizona comes a new disclosure this week that a beer industry group made one of the largest donations to an organization set up to defeat legalization in Massachusetts.

• The Beer Distributors PAC, an affiliate that represents 16 beer-distribution companies in Massachusetts, gave $25,000 to the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy Massachusetts, tying it for third place among the largest contributors to the anti-pot organization.

• The long-awaited report by the United Nations High Level Panel on Access to Medicines was released today, making many recommendations. The panel calls for countries to embrace the policy space available in the World Trade Organization intellectual property rules, and invest more in health. It also calls for negotiation of a binding international treaty on research and development, delinking prices from R&D costs, greater transparency in drug pricing, public health impact assessments in free trade agreements, and encouragement to better use international legal tools available to countries to ensure affordable medical products. And it lays out the path ahead, calling for several new bodies to be created to take recommendations forward.

• Pharmaceutical executives who recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

• On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

• The drug company, which currently markets a fast-acting version of the deadly painkiller fentanyl, assured local news reporters that they had the public interest in mind when making the hefty donation. A spokesperson told the Arizona Republic that Insys opposes the legalization measure, Prop. 205, “because it fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.”

• A Washington Post story on Friday noted the potential self-interest involved in Insys’s donation.

• Investor filings examined by The Intercept confirm the obvious.

• EXCERPT: TTIP has met resistance from the public, governments and parliaments of both Austria and France. The controversial deal will reduce consumer protection as well as the safety of foodstuffs.

• Governments are urged to do more to promote the development of desperately-needed new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics at affordable prices and address the failures of research and development (R&D) in a new report by Médecins Sans Frontières.

Security

• Secure application deployment principles must extend from the infrastructure layer all the way through the application and include how the application is actually deployed, according to Tim Mackey, Senior Technical Evangelist at Black Duck Software. In his upcoming talk, “Secure Application Development in the Age of Continuous Delivery” at LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe, Mackey will discuss how DevOps principles are key to reducing the scope of compromise and examine why it’s important to focus efforts on what attackers’ view as vulnerable.

• Microsoft released 14 security bulletins for September, seven of which are rated critical due to remote code execution flaws. Microsoft in all its wisdom didn’t regard all RCEs as critical. There’s also an “important rated” patch for a publicly disclosed flaw which Microsoft claims isn’t a zero-day being exploited. But at least a 10-year-old hole is finally being plugged.

• Next month marks a significant change as Microsoft says it intends roll out “servicing changes” that include bundled patches. Unless things change, not all Windows users will be able to pick and choose specific security updates starting in October.

• Microsoft was first notified about the so-called information disclosure bug in September 2015, security vendor Proofpoint said in an alert this week. But a patch for it became available only after Trend Micro and Proofpoint reported the bug again to Microsoft more recently when researching a massive malvertising campaign being operated by a group called AdGholas, the alert noted.

• If there’s a car in your yard that has automatic, so-called ‘smart’ keys, you should consider keeping the keys in the fridge. That’s the message from Finnish police, who say that high-tech criminals could hack cars with such systems.

• “It sounds strange, but it makes sense,” said Jari Tiiainen of the National Bureau of Investigation.

• These so-called smart keys work by emitting a signal when the driver touches the door handle. The lock opens when it recognises the key’s signal. Criminals have technology that can strengthen that signal even from a hundred metres away—well inside the residential property where most owners keep their keys, according to Eero Heino of the If insurance company.

Defence/Aggression

• Last week, Hillary Clinton told reporters on her campaign plane that the Russians are trying to disrupt the U.S. elections to discredit the process and sow discord among Americans. This goes one step further than her previous charges of Russian influence through the “Kremlin’s candidate,” Donald Trump, or still earlier, the claim that the Democratic National Committee’s server had been hacked by intelligence services reporting to Vladimir Putin. Of course, all these charges were made without proof.

• Donald Trump’s attempt to present himself as an anti-war candidate is based on his perfect 20/20 hindsight of the disastrous consequences of regime change in Iraq and Libya — military campaigns he publicly supported when they were popular, and only turned against after they went wrong.

• To better understand that Trump really is, as he insisted during the Republican primary campaign, “much more militaristic” than even George W. Bush, it helps to look at how often he has presented his bizarre plan to use the United States military as the muscle in a global protection racket, aimed at extorting oil from countries we destroy.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in a speech before newly sworn-in government officials on September 12, called for US special forces to leave the southern island of Mindanao. The next day, in an address to the Philippine Air Force, he said the Philippines would no longer stage joint patrols with the United States in the South China Sea.

• Duterte also declared he was looking to secure arms from China and Russia, saying he would send Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana to these countries to see what they had to offer.

• The statements mark a further souring of ties between Manila and Washington under the new president. The US State Department responded by saying it had received no formal notice from the Philippines regarding its special forces in Mindanao and thus would not pull the troops out.

• A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 – and was to some of us – that the West’s military intervention to “protect” civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous “regime change” operation.

• The report from the U.K.’s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the “humanitarian” mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.

• While it’s certainly possible Russia has been busy using hackers to meddle in (or at least stoke the idiot pyres burning beneath) the U.S. elections, we’ve noted how actual evidence of this is hard to come by. At the moment, most of this evidence consists of either comments by anonymous government officials, or murky proclamations from security firms that have everything to gain financially from stoking cybersecurity tensions. Of course, transparent evidence is hard to come by when talking about hackers capable of false flag operations while obfuscating their footprints completely.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• For years, the BBC has been criticised for the false balance of its climate change coverage. And for years, the BBC has apparently been doing “ongoing work” to fix it. So far, however, this ‘reform’ has been more like a triumph of the middling. Yes, the BBC may broadcast less outright misinformation, but as a scientist and a citizen, I still feel let down by its continually careless handling of climate denial – most recently two weeks ago. This nod to mediocrity is a disservice to science, to public trust, and to the biggest news story in the world. And it is a huge, missed opportunity.

• As a young PhD graduate working on climate change solutions, I am confronted daily by a world where the warnings of science are undercut by Fox ‘News’ and its ilk. It is a very different world to the trustworthy BBC broadcasts of David Attenborough and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures that I grew up with, which helped inspire me to become a scientist. But as a recent BBC News segment by Science Editor David Shukman sadly reminded me, those worlds can too easily collide.

• On the summer day of June 22, a Van Boekel Hog Farms slaughterhouse transportation truck headed to Fearman’s Pork Inc. was stationary, Anita Krajnc, the co-founder of Toronto Pig Save, and another activist stopped to give the pigs water and document their experience. The driver confronted the two women and told them to stop giving the pigs water. While Krajnc asked the driver to show compassion, he threatened her with physical assault and called the police.

• Now Krajnc is being charged with criminal mischief — interference with the use, enjoyment of and operation of property — under $5,000 for showing thirsty pigs compassion. Although there are reports that she’s willing to go to jail.

• Compassion is NOT criminal! Why do inmates on death row get a last meal, but innocent pigs are denied water? Why are praised for helping thirsty dogs and cats, but charged as criminals for helping pigs?

• The UK is to ban commercial fishing from a million square kilometres of ocean around British overseas territories, the government said on Thursday.

• In total, the government is creating marine protected areas around four islands in the Pacific and Atlantic, including the designation this week of one of the world’s biggest around the Pitcairn Islands.

• A 840,000 sq km (320,000 sq mile) area around Pitcairn, where the mutineers of the Bounty settled, becomes a no-take zone for any fishing from this week. St Helena, around 445,000 sq km of the south Atlantic ocean and home to whale sharks and humpbacks, is now also designated as a protected area.

• The foreign office said it would designate two further marine protection zones, one each around two south Altantic islands – Ascension by 2019 and Tristan da Cunha by 2020.

• Sir Alan Duncan, minister of state for Europe and the Americas, said: “Protecting 4m sq km of ocean is a fantastic achievement, converting our historic legacy into modern environmental success.”

• The fight by the Standing Rock Sioux to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline has emerged as one of the defining climate justice fights in the United States.

• It has also become a central focal point of the ongoing worldwide struggle by indigenous peoples to have their treaty and land rights respected by other governments and corporations. (The fact that corporations operate as de facto government is a galling example of the need for the Green Party).

• Representatives of more than 280 Native American tribes have now participated in the occupation, an unprecedented gathering of indigenous peoples after centuries of war, genocide, and land theft.

• Indigenous people are among the most vulnerable communities on the front lines of the climate crisis, and are leading the fight. Corporations have repeatedly used force to extract fossil fuels from their lands with approval from government attorneys and military forces. Major pipeline projects invariably cut across Native lands while bypassing white suburban communities.

• We must follow the lead of indigenous communities that have protected their land for countless generations, and work together in solidarity to ensure a thriving planet for future generations and all living beings.

• Ajamu Baraka, my Vice Presidential running mate, and I visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s occupation last week. We went to demonstrate Green Party solidarity with their struggle. The silence of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on this issue is deafening.

Finance

• European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker today reaffirmed his commitment to CETA – the EU-Canada trade deal – calling it as “the best and most progressive agreement that we have ever entered into.”

• His comments came during the annual State of the European Union address, where he also spoke about his regret at the slow pace of the ratification of the Paris climate agreement (“Dragging our feet on ratification affects our credibility and makes us look ridiculous”) and promised to protect farmers (“The Commission will always stand by our farmers”) and citizens’ rights (“In Europe, consumers are protected against cartels and abuses by powerful companies”).

• TiSA is often considered the “little” brother of the two “big” trade agreements TPP or TTIP – but this view seems more and more inappropriate, as the global economy is shifting towards a service-oriented/based economy. According to the World Bank, world-wide trade in services in 2015 was around 13% of the global GDP; for the EU it is even twice that figure (around 24% of its total GDP). But it is not just these numbers alone that prove that the TiSA negotiations deserve a much higher attention in the public discussion as they currently have:

• A former DWP minister with responsibility for disabled people is set to be suspended from the House of Commons for leaking a parliamentary report to a payday lender.

• Justin Tomlinson shared the findings of a draft report into regulating payday loans with an employee of Wonga.

• A former DWP minister with responsibility for disabled people is set to be suspended from the House of Commons for leaking a parliamentary report to a payday lender.

• Justin Tomlinson shared the findings of a draft report into regulating payday loans with an employee of Wonga.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Finally, there was the “appearance” at a security conference by Guccifer 2.0, the guy who has released the DNC emails that gave the Democrats an excuse to force Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s to resign, though they had been looking for an excuse for some time.

• In point of fact, Guccifer 2.0 didn’t appear in person at the conference. Rather, he sent a speech which got read at the conference, with the transcript released to journalists. The speech focused on the negligence of software companies in security. Guccifer went on for several paragraphs about the power and sloppiness of tech companies, arguing they were to blame for hacks.

• Donald Trump’s campaign website implores voters to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” by signing up as observers. He warned people at an Aug. 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to “go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times.” Less than a week later, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because “you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting.”

• In August, the presidential campaigns of Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and Libertarian Gary Johnson were sent 20 crucial science topics to consider. The questions for each topic were determined by leading American scientific institutions and what they felt were today’s most pressing issues in science and technology.

• The Democratic National Committee chairwoman said the DNC was the victim of a Russian cyberattack after the infamous hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 — who leaked internal Democratic documents ahead of the party’s convention this summer — released more apparent DNC documents Tuesday.

• The most recent leak includes information about the DNC’s finances, donors’ personal contact information and the DNC’s network infrastructure, according to CNN. The leak also includes vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s cell phone number and the contact information for several top White House officials, NBC News reported. No emails appear to have been included.

• Additionally, the first link Google provides when searching for Pepe the frog is a new page on the Clinton website explaining how the popular meme, dating to 2008, is now a symbol of white supremacy.

• Over on Wikipedia, editors have been engaged in an edit war, after the page was changed to say that the anthropomorphic frog is associated with Trump, white nationalism, and the alt-right.

• Former secretary of State and retired four-star general Colin Powell called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “a national disgrace” and “international pariah,” and said “Hillary’s mafia” was trying to drag him into Clinton’s email scandal in personal emails that were leaked by hackers, according to online news organizations BuzzFeed and The Daily Caller.

• Powell made the remarks about Trump in a June 17, 2016, email to Emily Miller, a journalist who once worked under Powell as a deputy press secretary at the State Department. In the email Powell said Trump, “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for the Dems to attack him,” according to BuzzFeed. “Paul Ryan is calibrating his position again,” Powell said of the speaker of the House who had only recently decided to endorse Trump at the time of the email.

• An aide to Powell confirmed the hack Wednesday, telling The New York Times “they are his emails.”

• Around 30,000 stolen Powell emails were given to DCLeaks.com by unnamed hackers, The Daily Caller reported. There is speculation among some computer experts and Democratic politicians that DCLeaks has ties to Russian intelligence services, according to The Wall Street Journal. There is concern that leaks from the site are intended to influence the outcome of the upcoming presidential election.

• Candid emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell are causing a stir across the country with their blunt assessment of a host of Washington’s stars.

• The emails, released by hackers behind a WikiLeaks-type website believed to have ties to Russian intelligence, show Powell criticizing Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney.

• The remarks, made by Powell in private to friends and colleagues, contrast with the statesmanlike image cultivated over a long military and political career.

• Powell served under President George W. Bush and endorsed Barack Obama in his two White House bids, and has generally avoided controversy in and out of office.

• The emails, first reported by BuzzFeed and The Intercept, were posted under password protection at DCLeaks. A spokesperson for Powell confirmed to media outlets that the emails were his.

• The website that leaked the emails reportedly has a relationship with Guccifer 2.0, who leaked damaging emails from Democratic groups earlier this summer, according to security experts.

• Here are five of their most eyebrow-raising revelations.

• In this exclusive report, distinguished research psychologist Robert Epstein explains the new study and reviews evidence that Google’s search suggestions are biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. He estimates that biased search suggestions might be able to shift as many as 3 million votes in the upcoming presidential election in the US.

• Biased search rankings can swing votes and alter opinions, and a new study shows that Google’s autocomplete can too.

• A scientific study I published last year showed that search rankings favoring one candidate can quickly convince undecided voters to vote for that candidate — as many as 80 percent of voters in some demographic groups. My latest research shows that a search engine could also shift votes and change opinions with another powerful tool: autocomplete.

• Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has long been one of the high priests of the Washington establishment, staying quiet in this year’s raucous presidential campaign while tending to his reputation as a thoughtful officer and diplomat.

• But a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton and his lingering, but still very raw, anger with the Republican colleagues with whom he so often clashed a decade ago.

• There has been an expectation that Mr. Powell, who waited until the final weeks to endorse Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, would do the same for Mrs. Clinton this year. But in one 2014 email released online, Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”

• The emails make clear that if Mr. Powell endorses Mrs. Clinton, he will be motivated by intense feelings about Mr. Trump, whom he also called an “international pariah.”

• Calling foreign influence on U.S. elections “a matter of national security,” FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub is joining her colleague Ann Ravel in calling for the full commission to plug the flow of foreign money into American political campaigns.

• In a new memo to her five fellow commissioners, Weintraub writes that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision created “new avenues for corporate political activity would make our democracy vulnerable to foreign individuals, corporations, and governments that seek to manipulate our elections.” Weintraub will ask the full FEC at its meeting on Thursday to begin the process of writing new regulations to deal with Citizens United and foreign money.

• Weintraub cites recent reporting by The Intercept on a $1.3 million donation by a U.S. corporation owned by Chinese citizens to a Super PAC backing Jeb Bush as evidence that this is not a “hypothetical” issue. “A person would have to be wearing some very rose-colored glasses,” Weintraub writes, “to think there are not foreign operatives interested in exploiting any vulnerability to influence our elections.”

• Her fellow commissioner Ann Ravel called on the FEC to take action in August, in the wake of The Intercept’s story.

• The Citizens United decision opened up a peculiar loophole for foreign money. Federal law prohibits “foreign nationals” — a legal term encompassing foreign individuals, corporations and governments — from putting money into the U.S. political process. But federal law also states that any company legally incorporated in the U.S., no matter its ultimate ownership, is a U.S. national.

• There are 15 states with new voting laws that have never before been used during a presidential election, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. These laws include restrictions like voter ID requirements and limits on early voting. Many are making their way through the courts, which have already called a halt to two laws in the past month — one in North Carolina and one in North Dakota.

• GOP nominee Donald Trump has said he plans to spend billions of dollars on so-called school choice programs. The $20 billion in federal funds would be available only to what he says are 11 million children living in poverty who are also “trapped in failing schools.” Families will be eligible for vouchers to send their children to charter, magnet or even private religious schools. Last Friday, he announced the policy would include homeschooling as well.

• “School choice is at the center of this civil rights agenda, and my goal is to provide every single inner-city child in America that is trapped in a failing government school the freedom to attend the school of their choice,” he said at a conservative voters conference. “School choice also means that parents can homeschool their children. Hundred percent.”

• But there’s one problem with Trump’s homeschooling plan: Impoverished homeschoolers mostly don’t exist.

• Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, stepped out of her small tent at the edge of the Missouri River here, where she’d slept in an encampment of protesters the night before. The tent and tarps of her small entourage had been procured second-hand right before this visit, and the plan was to leave the items behind as a donation to the cause.

• It was still early in the day, and a warrant had not yet been issued for her arrest — that would come much later. For the moment, this least known and most quixotic of the presidential candidates was but one of thousands of people who’d gathered to try to stop the construction of a planned $3.8 billion, 1,200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline, which they fear will desecrate sacred burial lands and potentially poison the water source for millions downstream.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Right, so remember how over the weekend the spineless execs at Univision decided to delete six articles from various Gawker properties? The reasoning made very little sense. The company claimed that since it had only agreed to acquire the assets of Gawker, but none of the liabilities, it felt that it needed to delete the six articles that were part of existing lawsuits (they also changed an image in one that was the subject of a copyright dispute). As we (and basically everyone else) pointed out, this was ridiculous on multiple levels. First, due to the single publication rule, any liability likely would be only for that initial publication. But, more importantly, the lawsuits in question were all pretty obviously bogus.

• Univision has been trying to go into damage control mode, including a long interview with JK Trotter at Gizmodo, answering a bunch of questions from angry Gawker reporters. Univision continues to stand by the line that this was solely and 100% about the terms of the transaction, in which they were not acquiring any liabilities, no matter how ridiculous those liabilities might be. They insisted there was no editorial analysis or First Amendment analysis — it was just about the liabilities. Gawker’s reporters are still not happy and have apparently discussed the possibility of a walkout. They’ve also directly posted their unhappiness about the decision.

• But Timothy Burke at Deadspin (one of the former Gawker properties) took things one step further. Somewhat brilliantly, he’s written a brand new article about the latest happenings in a lawsuit involving former Major League Baseball pitcher Mitch Williams. If you don’t know, two of the articles that were taken down were about Williams, and he had sued Gawker over them. Of course, the court had already tossed out the claims against Gawker, since the statements made in the earlier Deadspin articles were all either substantially true or protected opinion. But the overall case continues. Williams is suing MLB Network, which fired him after Deadspin’s original posts. So, in this new article about the lawsuit against MLB Network, Burke uses the opportunity to effectively repost every bit of content that was taken down by Univision management. And this is why it’s clever: he’s not just reposting it, but reposting it from the lawsuit.

• It may be the most famous photo of the Vietnam War: A 9-year-old girl flees naked down a highway with other frightened children after American warplanes dropped napalm on their village in an action targeting Viet Cong guerillas.

• Associated Press photographer Nick Ut snapped the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of Kim Phuc and the other children in 1972. Nearly every daily newspaper in the world ran the photo at the time and in the years that followed. For Americans and our allies, it brought home the suffering of the war and the unanticipated consequences of what we presumed were our good intentions; for our Cold War adversaries, the shot was propaganda manna from the Communist equivalent of heaven.

• Facebook’s initial argument that posting the iconic photo would make it more difficult subsequently to refuse to post other photos of naked children was arguably disingenuous but also just plain faulty. Surely a company with the obvious, indeed mindboggling, technical chops that Facebook possesses, has the ability to create an algorithm to take such markers as Pulitzer Prizes into account when making publication calls. Although there are bigger issues here related to letting algorithms make such editorial judgements in the first place, with or without human assistance, the problem in this particular case really should not have arisen at all.

• But editors also are on shaky ground in trying to dictate to Facebook what it should or should not publish. It is in fact ironic that they should think doing so is appropriate, let alone righteous, behaviour.

• Don’t you just hate it when this happens? As content curator for one of the world’s largest social media platforms, you delete a picture you consider obscene. Then some Norwegian woman writes an angry post. So you delete her post, too.

• While Nintendo has been making waves for some time with its overly aggressive DMCA takedowns of any fan-work that includes its intellectual property, the company has really ramped things up lately. Recent actions include the takedown of a Mario fan game, a remake of a 25-year-old Metroid title, and engaging in all kinds of craziness over its Pokemon Go title. It was enough that one of Nintendo’s biggest rivals couldn’t help but take a subtle potshot at it, while simultaneously treating Sega fans like human beings.

• Daniel Coyle, on Twitter as SuperSonic68, headed up a team of Sonic the Hedgehog fans in the development of a fan-made 3D Sonic game. Their work has been received rather well as of late, including on gaming blogs and YouTube channels. When one YouTube channel, GameGrumps, did a “let’s play” of the fan game, it appears that Sega noticed and reached out in the comments section with a poke at Nintendo’s aggressive nature and some encouragement.

• Facebook makes value judgements about what can appear in News Feed and what’s censored, but insists its a tech company not a media editor.

• At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, writer Josh Constine sat down with Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed, to hear more about how policies control what you see.

• The talk started with Constine asking Mosseri much content people consume daily on their News Feed. Mosseri shared a new statistic, which is that the average Facebook users reads a little over 200 stories a day on their feed, which is about 10 percent of the 2,000 possible stories Facebook has to show them each day.

• Cal State Long Beach President Jane Close Conoley effectively canceled the performance of “N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk” at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Center Director Michele Roberge resigned, in protest calling the cancellation a form of censorship, but Conoley said she did not intend censorship and said the canceled performance lacked educational value. No matter that the show played at CSULB last year and no student complained. Conoley did say that unnamed professors and sponsors complained.

• Conoley has every right to critique the performance. But canceling something because it lacks educational value is censorship that goes beyond the academic pale. Her censorship policies, if left to stand, will suffocate the creative imagination at CSULB.

• Roberge stood up for academic values. The president should not accept her resignation. If she accepts it, then she should be the one who is resigning. In that case, I hope that faculty, students and all members of the Long Beach community who value freedom of expression call for the president’s resignation.

• Under the Communist Party, China remains a culturally suppressive society defined by censorship rather than free speech.

• Yet Chinese censorship stifles not only the Chinese citizenry, but also the American public. As globalization accelerates and state-sponsored firms commit to private investment in the West, the Communist Party grows increasingly influential beyond its own borders.

• How much pain and suffering is the male orgasm worth? Is there ever a time when a man’s right to access hardcore pornography is outweighed by the rights of young women to feel safe?

• I am wondering this in light of today’s Women and Equalities Committee Report into sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools. The way in which young men see their female peers is tainted, poisoned by broader cultural narratives about what female bodies are for. Boys are not born with a need to hurt and humiliate for pleasure, but they are acquiring it, and fast.

Privacy/Surveillance

• UK security certification body Crest is set to take over the NSA’s own accreditation program, in a major validation for the scheme and Britain’s expertise in the sector.

• Crest signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the spy agency this week to take over the operation of its Cyber Incident Response Assistance (CIRA) program.

• Edward J. Snowden, the American who has probably left the biggest mark on public policy debates during the Obama years, is today an outlaw. Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed to journalists secret documents detailing the United States’ mass surveillance programs, faces potential espionage charges, even though the president has acknowledged the important public debate his revelations provoked.

• Mr. Snowden’s whistle-blowing prompted reactions across the government. Courts found the government wrong to use Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify mass phone data collection. Congress replaced that law with the USA Freedom Act, improving transparency about government surveillance and limiting government power to collect certain records. The president appointed an independent review board, which produced important reform recommendations.

• The Fourth Amendment contains an exception for “plain view:” evidence of criminal activity seen by law enforcement, whether it’s through a cracked-open doorway, on a vehicle’s seat, etc., can be seized and used without seeking a warrant. The government would also like to avail itself of a “plain hearing” exception, which it can use to salvage evidence of criminal activity in overheard conversations intercepted with a wiretap.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with the government’s “plain hearing” theory, though not with its assertions on how far the exception should stretch.

• “Snowden,” Oliver Stone’s best movie in years, benefits from the same biopic approach as “Born on the Fourth of July,” by giving us the personal story and not just the inner workings of the intelligence community that we gleaned from Laura Poitras’ Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” documentary.

• “Snowden” is a gripping narrative about the changing perceptions of the whistleblower (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he moves from idealism to disillusionment— while remaining a patriot. The film’s editors Lee Percy and Alex Marquez helped to humanize the NSA contractor’s life and what motivated him to leak thousands of classified documents to journalists, exposing covert global surveillance programs.

• Oliver Stone’s life work has been in pursuit of the truth, and the Oscar-winning director has a special respect for those who seek it out off screen.

• It’s why Stone, who initially said no to directing a movie about Edward Snowden, ultimately met with the National Security Agency whistleblower nine times in Moscow to capture the needed authenticity for his drama Snowden (in theaters Friday).

• “Hillary will never change it”, Bill says, referring to the current bulk surveillance regime. “She’s in with them. I think she’s a warmonger myself. She’s the one who advocated the interference in Libya, in Syria she wanted to bomb them and all this other stuff in the Middle East – she was advocating for it. She voted for the Iraq war and all that. She voted for destabilising the area [...] and all its doing is creating perpetual wars, so I have no hope for her at all.

• Not everyone writing in the Guardian today is empathetic towards the whistleblower. The former director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, says Snowden should face “the full force of the law” were he to come home. Stewart Baker, also latterly of the NSA, argues that Snowden’s leak caused harm to US national interests – a contention that is strongly disputed by many of the other people writing here.

• Thanks to Edward Snowden’s act of conscience, we’ve made historic strides in our fight for surveillance reform and improved cybersecurity. That’s why today, ahead of this week’s release of the Oliver Stone movie “Snowden,” we’re unveiling a major effort calling on President Obama to pardon the NSA whistleblower.

• Generally speaking, taking cues from China on things like best ways to censor the internet… probably isn’t the best idea. Yet, it appears that’s exactly what the UK’s big surveillance agency, GCHQ is doing. The “Director-General of Cyber” (that’s a thing? yikes!) at GCHQ, Ciaran Martin, gave a speech at a cybersecurity summit in DC recently and announced exciting plans to censor the UK internet at a DNS level. No, really.

• More collaboration is happening between the public and private sector to combat cyber security threats

• GCHQ has plans to create a firewall that could protect government agencies and British internet users against malicious cyber attacks.

• Ciaran Martin, the intelligence agency’s director general of cyber security, outlined his plans for the firewall at a cybersecurity conference in Washington DC. Martin was speaking as the head of the National Cyber Security Centre – a newly-created arm of GCHQ that has been tasked with creating the first “cyber force” dedicated to combating online threats to the UK.

• According to Martin, GCHQ is exploring a “flagship project” aimed at protecting government websites and national security agencies from hacks and other cyber attacks. He went on to say that the as-yet-unbuilt firewall could also be used by private internet service providers such as BT, Sky and Virgin.

• Privacy groups have expressed serious concern at the prospect of a “Great British Firewall” proposed by the surveillance agency GCHQ to protect major British companies against malicious hackers.

• They said they were worried that it could be used to deny freedom of speech, with the government potentially able to designate sites they disapprove of as “malware”.

• There is also concern about the prospect of handing over such power to GCHQ, given its track record of intrusion working in tandem with the US National Security Agency (NSA).

• Thomas Falchetta, a legal officer for Privacy International, said: “Given the broad scope of GCHQ’s hacking operations both domestically and abroad, this seems like the fox protecting the chicken.”

• GCHQ insisted that privacy concerns would be “hardwired” into the project and companies would have a choice about whether to participate or not.

• GCHQ has long argued that, in spite of all the revelations over the last three years about its hacking operations and the scale of its surveillance, it is also responsible for trying to battle hostile hackers. It says that its expertise make it best placed to help UK companies.

• On the release of Oliver Stone’s new film, “Snowden,” we speak with WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison, who accompanied NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and spent four months with him in the airport in Russia. She describes how Snowden reached out to the Courage Foundation, which she directs and which raises defense funds for Snowden and other whistleblowers. “We really wanted to try and show the world that there are people who will stand up” and help whistleblowers, says Harrison.

• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden “stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.” We get reaction from WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison and filmmaker Oliver Stone. “She misses the point that no spy gives his story to the newspapers for free, which is what he did,” Stone says. “He handed over all the information.” Harrison adds, “To me, this is all just rhetorical spin trying to deflect from the real situation.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• President Barack Obama welcomes Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the White House Wednesday, where he is eager listen to her views on how far the U.S. should go in lifting sanctions on the southeast Asian country.

• It will be her first visit to the U.S. as State Counselor and Foreign Minister – a position she assumed after her party’s decisive win in last November’s elections. The country’s military era constitution bars her from holding the title of president because her late husband and children are foreign citizens.

• Aung San Suu Kyi spent more than 20 years under house arrest in the country formerly known as Burma. Her meeting with Obama in the Oval Office is viewed as another clear indication that she is Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader.

• Imprisoned former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has learned that she will receive gender transition surgery, her lawyer told CNN, in what could make her the first US prison inmate to undergo such a procedure. Manning, a transgender woman, was convicted of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and videos to WikiLeaks.

• The former US Army soldier is serving a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, an all-male Army prison in eastern Kansas, despite her request to transfer to a civilian prison. Her lawyers say she has been denied medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition in which there is a conflict between a person’s physical sex and the gender he or she identifies with.

• U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning will receive gender affirming surgery, and is ending her hunger strike after five days, her lawyers have confirmed.

• “I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing,” Manning said in a statement. “I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted — for them to let me be me. But it is hard not to wonder why it has taken so long.”

• Until her surgery, the military will still require Manning to keep her hair short.

• “After being arrested, I was suicidal and hopeless,” Austin Yabandith, a 17-year-old from Superior, Wisconsin, recalls. “As of right now, I am just hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”

• The “worst” would be pretty bad. After discovering indecent photos of Austin’s 15-year-old girlfriend on his cell phone—as well as a video of the couple having sex—authorities charged him with sexual assault of a child, sexual exploitation, and possession of child pornography. The sexual assault charge is considered a Class C felony, and carries a maximum (though unlikely) sentence of 40 years in prison.

• Relative calm has been restored to the Indian city of Bangalore following the deaths of two men amid riots over an ongoing water dispute. Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to protesters to exercise restraint and follow the law as a heavy paramilitary presence was deployed Wednesday. Protests began earlier this week over a water sharing deal between the Indian states of Karnataka and neighboring Tamil Nadu.

• One demonstrator was shot dead by police, Karnataka chief minister S Siddaramaiah said in a press conference Tuesday. Another died in hospital following injuries sustained from a fall while fleeing police during Monday’s clashes.

• Driving through this dusty desert city of many ornate and ancient mosques, Shirin Yakubov recalls the ruthlessness of her country’s recently deceased president of 25 years.

• “He killed all of them, every last one,” she says of Islam Karimov’s role in the 2005 police massacre of hundreds of suspected Islamists in the eastern city of Andijan following unrest.

• One car was burnt in the Amager district and another was torched four hours later in Nørrebro.

• “Both cars are completely destroyed, and we are investigating the fires as arson,” Copenhagen Police spokesman Carsten Reenberg told news agency Ritzau.

• The incidents marked the fourth consecutive night of car fires in the Copenhagen area and bring the total of vehicles burnt since mid-August to over 50.

• FGM is typically carried out on girls aged between five and eight. It involves total or partial removal of or injury to female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It is often performed without anaesthetic or by someone without medical qualifications

• A police officer in Columbus, Ohio, fatally shot a 13-year-old boy he was trying to detain following reports of an armed robbery, officials said.

• Authorities identified the teenager as Tyree King. The Columbus Division of Police said in a statement that King “pulled a gun from his waistband” when officers attempted to take him and another male into custody Wednesday night.

• This is an extremely significant victory for all faculty, be they tenured, contingent, tenure-track or adjunct. Be they at LIU or elsewhere.

• We all owe a great thanks to the stalwart faculty at LIU–and to their student supporters. They have demonstrated the limits of institutional fiat, for the good of all faculty everywhere.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The European Commission has promised free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years.

• A new grant, with a total budget of €120 million, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point. If approved by the the European Parliament and national ministers the cash could be available before the end of next year.

• Former US Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz today used a 3.5 hour hearing of a Senate subcommittee he chairs to attempt to scare the US Commerce Department National Telecommunications and Information Administration away at the last minute from its plans to transition out of its stewardship role for the internet root zone system.

• Roughly every month or so I’ll see a story proclaiming that cord cutting is a bad idea because you need to subscribe to multiple services to mirror the same overall volume of content you receive from pay TV. There are a few problems with that logic, first being that cord cutters aren’t looking to precisely duplicate cable TV. They’re looking to get away from paying a small fortune for hundreds of unwatched channels, including an ocean of religious programming, infomercials, whatever the Weather Channel is up to these days, and C-grade channels focused on inherently inane prattle.

• Writers of these pieces always seem to forget that broadcasters dictate the pricing of content on both platforms, so any surprise that the pricing of television remains somewhat high (when you pile on multiple streaming services) is just kind of silly. All told, “cord cutting is really expensive when I subscribe to every streaming service in the known universe” is just a weird narrative that just keeps bubbling up across various media outlets despite not really making much sense.

• We’ve noted for years now how Verizon’s modus operandi is to promise uniform fiber deployment to a city or state in exchange for all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, then walk away giggling to itself with the job only partially complete. This story has played out time and time again thanks to city and state contracts struck behind closed doors without public transparency, allowing Verizon to bury numerous loopholes in the contract language. Other times, Verizon can lobby to weaken oversight so that there’s simply nobody left to hold Verizon accountable when it decides to laugh off the contract requirements.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The nomination of Sylvie Forbin of France to be the next head of copyright issues at the World Intellectual Property Organization was finalised yesterday as the WIPO Coordination Committee approved her appointment. Forbin is set to start work at WIPO on Monday.

• Forbin would be the deputy director general for copyright and the creative sector at WIPO.

• She is a corporate lobbyist for media giant Viacom in Paris, and worked with French foreign service in the past.

• The European Court of Justice today ruled that a shop offering WiFi is not liable for copyright infringements on its network but may be forced by rightsholders to require passwords to use the network.

• This is not a surprise given the earlier leaks of what the EU Commission was cooking up for a copyright reform package, but the end result is here and it’s a complete disaster for everyone. And I do mean everyone. Some will argue that it’s a gift to Hollywood and legacy copyright interests — and there’s an argument that that’s the case. But the reality is that this proposal is so bad that it will end up doing massive harm to everyone. It will clearly harm independent creators and the innovative platforms that they rely on. And, because those platforms have become so important to even the legacy entertainment industry, it will harm them too. And, worst of all, it will harm the public greatly. It’s difficult to see how this proposal will benefit anyone, other than maybe some lawyers.

• Not surprisingly, the EU Commission is playing up the fact that this package does knock down some geoblocking in setting up more of a “single market” for digital content, but after Hollywood started freaking out about it, that proposal got watered down so much that plenty of content will still be geo-blocked. And there’s so much other stuff in here that’s just really, really bad. As expected, it includes a ridiculous ancillary copyright scheme, which should really just be called the “Google tax” for linking to copyright-covered content.

• The proposal does away with the liability limitations for platforms, effectively requiring any tech platform that allows user-generated/user-uploaded content to build or license their very own ContentID system. This is ridiculous. If the idea was to punish Google, this will do the opposite. Basically no startup will be able to afford this, and it will just lock in platforms like YouTube as the only option for content creators wishing to upload video. Protecting intermediary liability has been shown, time and time again, to enable new innovation and also to enable greater creativity and free speech — and the EU Commission basically just tossed it in the garbage because some Hollywood interests think (incorrectly) that internet companies “abuse” the protections.

• Of course, when we last checked in with Hansmeier he was aggressively filing questionable ADA lawsuits, basically shaking down small retail stores for any possible violation of the ADA he could find. I’m guessing that’s going to need to stop — but I do wonder if he’ll find someone else to keep doing the legal work on that kind of scam.

• Anyway, Hansmeier has now had his assets liquidated in bankruptcy and his law license taken away. What’s next? Well, last we’d heard, it sounded like criminal charges were getting closer, so perhaps he has that to look forward to as well.

• A recipe for disaster indeed.

• This is, of course, not the first time we’ve noted the problems of intellectual property in the science world. From various journals locking up research to the rise of patents scaring off researchers from sharing data, intellectual property keeps getting in the way of science, rather than supporting it. And that’s extremely unfortunate. I mean, after all, in the US specifically, the Constitution specifically says that copyrights and patents are supposed to be about “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.”

• Over and over again, though, we see that the law has been twisted and distorted and extended and expanded in such a way that is designed to protect a very narrow set of interests, at the expense of many others, including the public who would benefit from greater sharing and collaboration and open flow of data among scientific researchers. Having the CJEU make things worse in Europe isn’t going to help Europe compete — and, unfortunately, it does not look like those in Europe looking to update its copyright laws understand any of this yet.

• The European Commission’s proposals to reform the region’s copyright rules, published in draft form today, have been criticized by tech companies and digital rights groups as regressive and a missed opportunity to modernize hopelessly outdated rules.

• The Open Rights Group accused the EC of ignoring EU citizens responses to an earlier consultation on the reform, and trying to bring in regressive rules that will force private companies to police the Internet.

• “The Commission’s proposals would fail to harmonise copyright law and create a fair system for Internet users, creators and rights holders. Instead we could see new regressive rights that compel private companies to police the Internet on behalf of rights holders,” said its executive director Jim Killock in a statement.

• A big point of concern for many critics is the EC seeking to shift the responsibility for identifying copyrighted content by requiring Internet companies that host user uploaded video, such as YouTube and Facebook, to proactively check for copyrighted material, rather than waiting to receive a take down request from a rights holder, as is the case now.

• Today, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize the EU’s copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to install mandatory piracy filters. While the Commission intends to strengthen the position of copyright holders, opponents warn that it will do more harm than good.

• The European Commission has finally presented its long-awaited copyright reform proposal. It ignores everything positive the European Parliament demanded in the earlier Reda report, and doubles down on introducing copyright for links.

• The UK Government’s Digital Economy Bill has moved a step closer to becoming law after its second reading in Parliament. With unanimous support, the current two-year maximum custodial sentence for online piracy is almost certain to increase to a decade. However, the reading also covered other familiar ground – pressure on Google to do something about piracy.

• This reference for a preliminary ruling was made in the context of proceedings between Sony and a person (Tobias Mc Fadden) who operates a business selling and renting lighting and sound systems for various events.

• Mc Fadden owns a Wi-Fi connection that is open to anyone to use as it not protected by any password. The main reason why McFadden provides password-free free internet access is to drive traffic to his website and encourage customers to visit his shop.

• In 2010 that connection was used by someone other than Mc Fadden to download unlawfully a musical work to which Sony owns the copyright. Following Sony’s formal notice, Mc Fadden sought a negative declaration from the referring court.

• This dismissed it and upheld Sony’s counterclaim, granting an injunction against Mc Fadden on the ground of his direct liability for the infringement at issue and ordering him to pay damages, the costs of the formal notice, and costs.

• Mc Fadden appealed that decision, arguing that the provisions of German law transposing Article 12(1) of the ECommerce Directive would shield him from liability for third-party infringements.

• The European Union has exclusive competence to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty on copyright exceptions for visually impaired people, the advocate general of the Court of Justice of the EU has found. This conclusion, which was well-received by representatives of the visually impaired, could speed up the ratification of the treaty by the EU.

• Further to the proposal for a regulation on cross-border portability of online content services in late 2015, the European Commission has just unveiled its new set of proposals to ameliorate EU copyright and achieve a fully functioning digital single market.

• These – among other things – include proposals for a new directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market and a regulation on certain online transmissions of broadcasting organisations and retransmissions. Both instruments, if adopted in their current form, will have a deep impact on the EU copyright framework, particularly with regard to online uses of copyright works, responsibilities of hosting providers, users’ freedoms, and authors’ contracts.

• EU proposals for the “modernisation of copyright to increase cultural diversity in Europe and content available online” turn out to be an implementation of the old copyright industries’ wishlist, with little that addresses online users’ needs.

• As expected, the proposed Copyright Directive will give news and magazine publishers—described by the EU as “press publishers”—a new 20-year “ancillary copyright” over and above the normal copyright. Although it is not yet clear how this will work in practice, the intent is to enable press publishers to control the use of online snippets drawn from “daily newspapers, weekly or monthly magazines of general or special interest and news websites.”

• Today the EU Commission released their proposal for a reformed copyright framework. What has emerged from Brussels is disheartening. The proposal is more of a regression than the reform we need to support European businesses and Internet users.

• To date, over 30,000 citizens have signed our petition urging the Commission to update EU copyright law for the 21st century. The Commission’s proposal needs substantial improvement. We collectively call on the EU institutions to address the many deficits in the text released today in subsequent iterations of this political process.

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